It was certainly an interesting read. The half-baked support for older instruction sets is something I didn't see in the early reviews, so it's great you pointed it out. I'd hate to see CPU-based PhysX games on Trinity given that PhysX uses x87 instructions almost exclusively.

Computing is increasingly going towards heterogeneous processing in the server, embedded and mobile space but I think AMD is really moving faster than the desktop software market and they're suffering because of it. I'm sure the reviews would be singing a completely different song if we had games that use as many threads as you can throw at them and all software offloading SIMD to GPGPU or SSE4a and the like. (Although even then I question that lack of L3 cache which I'm sure is crippling at least the gaming benchmarks...)

I compare this to Windows Vista where they added DirectX 10 and increased security only to cripple existing hardware, break a lot of software, and piss off a whole bunch of users. Unlike Vista however, at least the older stuff will still run despite not looking pretty... I wonder if AMD can ride it out on these current architectures until either the software catches up or they have to make revisions to make the legacy stuff not quite as bad (e.g. smaller node that allows them to re-add optimized execution units). Yep that's right, I'm calling Bulldozer / Trinity the Vista of CPUs

__________________"The computer programmer says they should drive the car around the block and see if the tire fixes itself." [src]